This came out about the time during a trend where some idea/concept like this, which could be nicely explained in a 10-20min TED talk or long form article was then padded out and published as a full size book.
It's publishing economics. If you go through a publisher, something like 250 pages is about the minimum they're willing to deal with. The one time I've gone through a publisher, I was happy enough with the second edition for, for the first edition, I really felt like I was padding out the book.
True. Something I used to do is go to a bookstore and if there was some new book that seemed like it had an interesting idea, I would look in the ToC for the chapter named the same as the book and just read that. I never felt like I walked away needing to buy the whole book when I did that, and so the only books I tended to buy were history, cooking and fiction.
